Poster

If there’s one question that comes up whenever I mention Laura Archibald’s new film, Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation, it’s this: How did a part-time educational assistant — a Kitchener resident with no previous filmmaking experience — convince music legends like Kris Kristofferson, Carly Simon and Pete Seeger to participate in a self-financed indie doc about the Manhattan music scene of the ’60s?

How did she convince Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon to not only narrate it, but to attend a post-film panel discussion at the Grand River Film Festival next Saturday (Oct. 20), along with folk legend Sylvia Tyson?

How — to get to the point — did she even know how to work a movie camera?

Sitting in uptown Waterloo’s Coffee Culture earlier this week, the soft-spoken 53-year-old — a mere sprite when Bob Dylan released his debut album in ’62 — takes in my question with a bemused grin.

“I think I was lucky,” she says, not about to blow her own horn. “I really just tracked down their managers or the record label and most of them just said ‘yes.’ It was a baptism by fire.”

She started with Oscar Brand — the well-connected Canadian folk legend whose ’60s TV show, Let’s Sing Out, featured a raft of seminal Village folk figures — who happily directed her to the likes of Pete Seeger and Peter Yarrow.

From here, it was a matter of connect-the-dots to Sonny Ochs, sister of the late folksinger Phil Ochs, who was two degrees of separation from Kris Kristofferson.

Archibald, meanwhile, had a previous connection to Carly Simon through an unproduced musical she wrote based on Simon’s songs. And on it went.

“These people are not scary,” confides the low-key maverick, who holds her ambitions in check. “They’re very approachable.”

Still, it’s an incredible feat, given the iconic subject matter: the evolution of the social and political consciousness of the ’60s, tied to the birth of the singer-songwriter movement, in a bohemian enclave in the heart of New York City.

The fact she tackled it 50 years after its heyday only makes it more impressive.

Fifty years. Those artists still alive and kicking — people like Melanie, Judy Collins and Arlo Guthrie — are in their 60s and 70s now, many out of the spotlight for decades, their contributions at risk of being forgotten.

Perhaps for that reason, they rallied to the cause, waxing eloquently about the connection between their articulately rendered protest pop and the cultural trends that revolutionized the staid conformity of a previous era.

“It’s very easy to reach back to the ’60s and talk about it,” says Archibald, whose fascination with the era stems from her own youth in a conservative household with two sibs, mom and high-school-principal dad, Larry Folliott.

“It’s as if that was the decade to be alive. This was the time of their lives. Things were changing, things were happening — JFK was assassinated, civil rights, Vietnam, the women’s movement, gay rights, people experimenting with drugs and sex.

“The fact you can condense all these interesting, exciting things into 10 years is pretty amazing.”

But why did they talk to her?

“I think because it’s a story that hadn’t been told — and most of these artists know it’s a story to be told from different perspectives.”

She pauses. “I made sure they felt they could say what they wanted, and that I listened. I was engaged with every person I interviewed.”

Not that things worked out exactly as planned.

Bob Dylan, she notes, is the usual focus of any discussion about the Village scene because of his towering influence on everyone around him.

Knowing this, she was determined to give other artists the spotlight — anyone heard about Phil Ochs lately? — and tried like hell to avoid mentioning the singer dubbed The Bard.

Guess what? It didn’t work.

“I realized I couldn’t exclude him,” she notes, laughing. “Everyone started talking about him, so he got a chapter: ‘What about Bob?’ ”

But her extensive research — reading biographies, scouring archival film clips, surfing the net and scrutinizing song lyrics — served her well.

“I think I got some original stuff,” she notes modestly. “How were the songs written? Where were they written? What were the nightclubs like? Who was hanging out there? How did it work as a community?”

Despite narrative shifts necessitated by the fact the film contains 32 perspectives on the same phenomenon — “it’s a hard story to tell” — her original premise remained intact: a snapshot of the Village as a crucible for the burgeoning ’60s counterculture.

“I was aware of the dynamic and hoping the outcome would be this community of like-minded people who all helped each other, and I think that’s what came out.’’

There are 16 performances in the film, 32 interviews and 12 years of history (1961-73), though Archibald says she could easily have made two more companion films.

“I left out many, many people due to health issues, because I couldn’t get an interview, or due to bad touring schedules. At the end of the day, at some point, you have to say ‘Stop!’ ”

One bittersweet omission was Suze Rotolo, the transcendent artist-girlfriend clasping Dylan’s arm on the cover of his ’63 classic, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

Archibald had the interview lined up, but Rotolo — whose politics greatly influenced Dylan’s music — died of lung cancer last year at 67.

In her place, actress Susan Sarandon reads excerpts from Rotolo’s memoir about her Village days with Dylan and the community that inspired them.

All of which adds up to ... well, hard to say, because until Saturday’s festival screening, no one other than Archibald and her family will have seen the final cut (although the trailer is fantastic. Check it out at: http://www.imdb.com/video/wab/vi2077793305/).

“How do you make a ‘talking head’ documentary interesting on a shoestring budget?” sums up Archibald, whose film will screen at New York’s prestigious DOC NYC film festival in November before opening in theatres a month later.

“It’s hard to do. Hopefully, we achieved it.”

Greenwich Village: Music that Defined a Generation is the festival’s closing-night gala. It screens at the Grand River Film Festival next Saturday (Oct. 20), 7 p.m., at Kitchener’s Empire Theatres. Sold out.